This is an amusing mistake; or at any rate what would the master of a pack of harriers give in these days for a field of silent gentlemen who would only raise their arms when they viewed a hare, instead of raising their voices to the cry of Stole-away! and such-like hullabaloo ? Again, "If I was under any concern, it was on account of the poor hare, that was now quite spent and almost within reach of her enemies; when the huntsman, getting forward, threw down his pole before the dogs. They were now within eight yards of the game which they had been pursuing for almost as many hours; yet on the signal before mentioned they all made a sudden stand, and, though they continued opening as much as before, durst not once attempt to pass beyond the pole. At the same time Sir Roger rode forward, and, alighting, took up the hare in his arms, which he soon after delivered up to one of his servants, with an order, if she could be kept alive, to let her go in his great orchard; where it seems he has several of these prisoners of war, who live together in a very comfortable captivity." This is an affecting picture, but it is something very like sheer nonsense, as the most humane act would have been to let a hare who had stood before them for some hours, be killed by the hounds, as the chances are that she never could live; or, as Mr. Freeman puts it in that terrible Fortnightly paper "On the Morality of Field Sports," if Sir Roger "could not find it in his heart to murder a creature that had given him so much diversion, he ought not to have found diversion in inflicting suffering which stopped only short of death, and which was, doubtless, far more bitter than a speedy death would have been." This is true enough, but it tells not so much against the sportsman as the humanitymonger and his mock sentiment.

Durdans, the seat of the Heathcotes, was built by Lord Berkeley from the ruins of Nonesuch, and very full of old memorials the place is. Pepys mentions (Sept. 16, 1660) going to St. James's to see the Duke of York, on Admiralty business, and finding him starting with the King, Queen, and Prince Rupert, to dine at Durdans. Evelyn, too, mentions in his quiet, amiable way, going to Durdans, in 1665, and finding an assembly of savans-Dr. Wilkins, Sir William Petty, and Mr. Hooke-" contriving chariots, new rigging for ships," and of all things in the world-what was no doubt a sort of bicycle-" a wheel to run races in." He adds: "perhaps three such persons together were not found elsewhere in Europe for parts and ingenuity." Wilkins was the man who tried to establish a universal language, and so nullify the fatal curse of Babel; Hooke was an astronomer, who was jealous of Newton, and claimed to have discovered the law of gravitation; and Petty was one of the most active founders of the Royal Society.

The great days of Durdans were when Frederick, Prince of Wales, the son of George the Second, came to reside there. It was this patron of dancing-masters and toadies who first gave rise to the saying,

That whether there was peace or war abroad, there was sure to be family discord among the Guelphs," His sisters despised him; his strutting, little, demoralised father pronounced him a puppy, fool, and scoundred; his mother cursed the hour in which he was born; and the prime minister described him as a poor, weak, irresolute, false, lying, dishonest, contemptible wretch. While still a lad he drank and gambled. "Ah! the tricks of pages," said his mother to his father. "No," replied the bear leader; "I wish to Heaven they were-they are the tricks of lacqueys, rascals!" One day looking out from a window at St. James's, he saw Bubb Doddington roll by. "There," said the estimable prince, "there goes a man they call the most sensible fellow in England; yet, with all his cleverness, I have just nicked him out of five hundred pounds." He joined the Opposition to spite his father and Sir Robert Walpole, and earned his father's undying hate by removing his wife when she was in actual labour from Hampton Court to St. James's Palace, from whence he was very soon "quoited" to Kew. His mother on her death-bed refused to insult his father by seeing him.

During the '45 Rebellion, he showed some feeble desire to lead the army, being jealous of his truculent brother, the Duke of Cumberland; but the fool's ambition subsided into having a model of Carlisle Castle made in confectionery, and bombarding it with sugar-plums at the head of his maids of honour and mistresses. Eventually the poor creature died from a oold caught by putting on a thin silk coat in the month of March, during a fit of pleurisy. In a fit of coughing, he broke an internal abscess, which had been caused by a blow from a tennis ball, cried out "I feel death!" and died almost immediately. The bitter Jacobite epitaph upon him was only too just:

Here lies Fred,

Who was alive, and is dead.

Had it been his father,

I had much rather;

Had it been his brother,

Still better than another;

Had it been his sister,

No one would have missed her;

Had it been the whole generation,

Still better for the nation;

But since 'tis only Fred,

Who was alive, and is dead,
There's no more to be said.

Some traditions of Fred still linger about Epsom.

An obelisk (the flint of which went to face St. Martin's Church, in the town) that formerly stood at the end of an avenue of walnut trees in the Common Fields, marked the spot of Fred's only victory. The prince, one morning, walking alone in his white silk coat, espied a specially sable sweep, sitting contemplatively under one of the trees, perhaps fatigued with the ascent of the palace chimneys. Fred, indignant at such an unmannered churl coming between the wind and his nobility, bade him begone, and at once. The tired sweep, espying

a fop or a footman, be hardly knew which, refused, point blank. The prince flourished his clouded cane, which the sweep wrenched from his hand and threw away, then stripped and offered combat. The prince, with a spark of the spirit of his grandshire at Dettingen, removed his silk coat and fell to. Tradition, generally loyal, affirms that the sweep was beaten; but there certainly are calumnious reports that the sweep conquered, and set his black foot on the wizen neck of Bubb Doddington's noble friend. Other local historians make George the Third (when a boy) the adversary and conqueror of the sweep-such is history. Soon after Fred's lamented death, a Mr. Belchier rebuilt Durdans, but a fire destroyed the place, and one of the Heathcotes reared the present structure of red brick bound with stone. Certain it is that young Prince George was much here at the time when the populace were so jealous of his mother's unwise intimacy with handsome Lord Bute. The only other recollection of royalty at Epsom is at Woodcote Park, where the drive to the Race-course has been closed ever since the Queen used it in 1840, her last visit to Epsom, at which place she is then supposed to have taken umbrage.

The crow flutters down for a moment on Pitt-place, that old mansion by the church. This house was the scene of one of the best authenticated, and yet most easily explained ghost stories than ever befooled the superstitious. It was the residence of Lord Lyttleton, secretary to Frederick, Prince of Wales, and author of the History of Henry the Second, and who leading the Prince to patronize Mallet, Thomson, Pope, Glover, and Dr. Johnson, gained him the only credit he ever got or deserved. It gives us pain to observe that the worthy nobleman's History is wretchedly dull, and his poetry, all but the monody to his wife, intolerable. The son of this worthy peer was a celebrated rake, who, a short time before his death, declared that he had seen a white dove flutter over his bed, look mournfully on him, then disappear. A short time after, the corpse of a woman clothed in white appeared by his bedside, and waved her livid hand, as she placed her face close to him, and uttered the words, "Lord Lyttleton, prepare to die!" he felt her cold breath, and saw that her eyes were glazed. He gasped out, "When ?" and the apparition replied, "Ere three days you must die." This dead woman was a Mrs. Amphlett, who had died of grief in Ireland on the seduction of her two daughters by Lord Lyttleton. On the fatal third day the rake, so the local tradition goes, breakfasted in London with Mrs. Amphlett's two daughters and some friends, was in high spirits, and remarked confidently, "If I live over to-night, I shall have jockied the ghost." The party then ordered post-horses, and set off for Pitt-place. On their arrival his lordship had a sharp attack of illness, but recovered. He went early to bed, first laughingly putting back the clock to deceive the ghost. He then sent his valet for a spoon to stir his medicine. On his return the servant found that his lordship had got out of bed, and had fallen dead on the floor. The simple fact is, that the miserable trickster had invented the whole story, having resolved to poison him self. There was, therefore, no miracle in the tolerably accurate fulfilment of a self-made prediction. "It was no doubt singular," says Sir Walter Scott, who was generally only too credulous, "that a man who meditated his exit from the world should have chosen to play such a

trick upon his friends; but it is still more credible that a whimsical man should do so wild a thing, than that a message should be sent from the dead to tell a libertine at what precise hour he should expire."

When the wells were beginning to be disregarded, Epsom became notorious as the residence of Mrs. Mapp, the bone-setter, a character whom Hogarth has immortalised in his picture of "The Consultation of Physicians." This Mrs. Mapp was the daughter of a Wiltshire bone-setter and sister of Polly Peachum, whom Gay enlisted into the "Beggar's Opera." The bone-setter and the wise woman were at this period much resorted to by English country people, who preferred a doctor who was also a little of the astrologer. This woman, after wandering about the country as a sort of privileged mad woman, suddenly became an authority in surgery, and settled at Epsom, where the company at the wells supplied her with occasional dislocations. Her success, indeed, is said to have brought her so many patients that the people of Epsom paid her to settle amongst them. Broken arms and legs she dexterously set, dislocated shoulders and elbows she refitted. Gifted with amazing strength, she would plant her foot against a patient's chest and drag his bones back to their true position. "Crazy Sally" was a dangerous woman to offend. Some surgeons, jealous of her fame, once sent her a "posture maker," as acrobats were then called, with a wrist apparently dislocated. The man groaned and screamed, but Sally felt in a moment that the bones were in their proper order; so, to have her revenge, she gave the man's arm such a wrench as to dislocate it. "Go," she said, "to the fools who sent you and try their skill, if you like, or come back here in a month and I'll put you straight." In her flowery days, Mrs. Mapp, the bone-setter, drove a carriage and four, and received as much as twenty pounds in the day. At last Mapp, footman to a mercer in Ludgate-hill, won by her full purse, married her, robbed her, and forsook her, all within the fortnight. She never recovered this, and died in London in 1737 so poor that she had to be buried by the parish.

The Reverend Jonathan Bouchier, who became rector of Epsom in 1784, deserves a word as a sturdy Royalist and a great scholar, of whom several interesting stories are told. Before the American war broke out, Mr. Bouchier was rector of several parishes in Virginia and Maryland. He once thrashed a rebel Yankee blacksmith who had insulted his King and country, and to the very last he persisted boldly in preaching Royalist sermons. On one occasion the Tory rector had been informed that if he dared pray for King George he would be fired at in his pulpit. Nothing daunted, the next Sunday the resolute man ascended the pulpit stairs armed with two horse-pistols, one of which he laid on either side of his pulpit cushion; with this preamble he preached an unflinching sermon, ending with this stinging passage:

"Unless I forbear praying for the King I have been notified that I am to pray no longer. No intimation could be more distressing to me; but I do not require a moment's hesitation, distressing as the dilemma is. Entertaining a respect for my ordination vow, I am firm in my resolution, whilst I pray in public at all, to conform to the unmutilated

Liturgy of my Church, and reverencing the injunctions of the Apostle: 'I will pray for the King and all who are in authority under him, as long as I live.' Yes, whilst I have my being, I will, with Zadok, the priest, and Nathan, the prophet, proclaim God save the King." The Americans had no heart to fire at so bold and honest a man, and Jonathan Bouchier descended the pulpit stairs unharmed. This learned clergyman married a descendant of Addison's, a very beautiful Virginian girl. A curious and authentic instance of presentiment preceded their first meeting. Miss Addison had dreamed that she saw her future husband, and awoke with a vivid remembrance of his face and manner. The next day Mr. Bouchier called on her father with letters of introduction, and on Miss Addison entering the room, she saw in the handsome stranger the lover of her dream. This rector of Epsom devoted many years to a completion of "Johnson's Dictionary." He left it at his death unfinished, and the manuscript, down to the letter I, is said to have been used by the compilers of "Webster's Dictionary."

The crow passing over Surrey on his swift way to the sea, alights at Ashtead Park, on one of the limes, an avenue of which light-leafed trees was planted when William of Orange came here to visit his loyal adherent, Sir Robert Howard, a poor dramatist, the prototype of Bayes, in the Duke of Buckingham's comedy of the Rehearsal, and the Sir Positive Atall of Shadwell's Sullen Lovers. His romantic plays, stuffed full of extravagant metaphors and false tropes, seem to have deserved all the ridicule showered upon them.

Evelyn tells us of a man he knew who planted an ash-tree, and before his death cut it down and sold it for forty shillings; and he goes on to mention, as a proof of the profits of growing trees, that he knew three acres of barren land sown with acorns, that in sixty years became a thriving wood worth three hundred pounds. The records of Ashtead help us to some facts about the age of trees, which are difficult to obtain elsewhere. Here as least we get at certainty. There are some fine Spanish chesnuts growing near the lake on this demesne that have reached the girth of twenty-two feet. These fine trees were planted by Thomas Davie, an old gardener, six years before the battle of Culloden. When a boy Davie brought from London three shillings' worth of Spanish chesnuts as a treat for his fellow-servants, but the fruit being then little eaten in England, the servants took a prejudice, and would not touch them. Davie, not wishing to waste the chesnuts, sowed them in a bed in the garden at Ashtead, and afterwards planted them out where they now stand. The sheltered, moist, warm park exactly suited them. These facts convince us more than ever that the age of celebrated trees is often overrated. Trees supposed to be of immense antiquity are often only the descendants of historic trees, but they have grown up in the same place and retained the name of their progenitors. But for the facts we have noted, the Spanish chesnuts of Ashtead would pass muster for veterans of three centuries, and the topographer might have sworn they were planted the year Catherine of Arragon came to England.

A certain curious legend is told of two large antlers preserved in Ashtead Hall. They once belonged to a king of the herd, a stag of